In 1972 when I was newly 18 I had my first vote to cast. I gave my election virginity to Richard Nixon. Like too many of us it wasn't as pleasant an experience as I would have hoped. Part of the reason I made that ugly choice is that in those early years I leaned to the conservative side, for mostly personal reasons best left to another diary, but I did.
It wasn't that I did it enthusiastically. Even with my moderate-right leaning I neither liked nor trusted the man, and I could have voted for many Democrats against him. But the choice was George McGovern, and I was convinced by all I'd heard and seen (in the bubble) that while he was a good man personally his administration would destroy the America I knew and loved and give de facto control to the loud obnoxious long-haired radicals that hated everything they saw except sex, drugs, and Communism.
It was all clever lies, exaggerations, and marketing, but so many in the country swallowed it whole that the dark prince Nixon won 49 of 50 states. We thought we knew what we were voting for and against, but we had not a clue.
As far as I know (and we do know, from the tapes and memoirs that have surfaced since) that the Nixon administration was the first in our nation's history where the Man himself and his closest aides discussed and planned in private not just for the defeat of the opposing party, but its total elimination as a political force for all time.
Nixon was a man full of (and too often driven by) resentments. It was part of his dark genius that he recognized that not only did he share those emotions with millions of other Americans from the social class he grew up in (middle and lower middle working people) but how to turn that hidden darkness into political gold.
The radicals of the day saw another vision for America, and for the first time ever they truly thought they could see the promised land: an America freed from corporate domination and loose from the shackles of a conserve religious authoritarianism hiding under a thin fake veneer of democracy for the sole real purpose of protecting the power and privilege of the wealthy WASP elite.
Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread, and the young bright radical liberals of the day rushed in an exuberant herd. They had the best of intentions and a dream I agree with, but they played into the hands of the Dark Prince so well he could have written the script himself. And he did his best to do just that, with some success. While publicly regretting that McGovern was running, Nixon's minions, with his knowledge and encouragement, did everything they could in secret to try and insure the McGovern wing's victory in the primaries and in the Democratic party.
For you see, Nixon's conscious goal was to split the Democrats into two warring factions permanently. We know this, it's not really even a matter of debate. Read the memoirs and listen to the tapes. Or read Richard Perlstein's excellent Nixonland if you don't have the time (and who does?) to go back to the source materials.
Perlstein's point (and that of this diary) is that Nixon perfected a formula for electoral success in the face of being outnumbered that is still the blueprint for what is happening today, just days away from 2015.
But I make the further point to you that it takes two to dance a tango, and this is true even if one partner is unwilling and unaware.
The radicals of my youth were sincere and full of energy, but they wound up being Nixon's foil in his stirring of middle class and blue collar cultural resentments.
Most of us are aware of that, yet too often we play the same role today.
I know you'd like for me to give you an example. I choose a positive one.
I look at the "Moral Monday" movement right here in my home state of North Carolina, and I see the prototype of a movement that might have terrified Nixon. It is inclusive, not dismissive of others. It seeks to persuade and set an example of quiet but true morality, not to shock the suburbanites into "waking up" as the radicals of the 1960s seem to think could be done. It does not dismiss or have contempt for religion. No successful movement at the present state of our culture can hope to do that and have wide appeal, I believe.
But it is not ashamed, it is not shy, it does not back down.
The opponents of constructive change use the very natural fear of that change to marshal popular resistance to it. Nixon wasn't the first, but he set the standard. Ronald Reagan, (someone whom Nixon saw as a threat, but who he watched and learned from) was a far more likeable figure than Tricky Dick, and further perfected it.
Let's keep dreaming of ways to actually change things instead of ramming our heads into the brick wall of social reality. There are positive examples out there.
And then let's finally win and consign the evil legacy of Richard Nixon's political cynicism to the history books where it belongs -- as an example of the misery inflicted on humanity in the name of one man's relentless and unscrupulous ambition to dominate and control.
A long, dark shadow indeed.
